On 15 June 1933 the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed a brand new piece by an unknown composer. The work had won first prize in a competition and the music critic of the Chicago Daily News declared it “a faultless work, a work that speaks its own message with restraint and yet with passion… worthy of a place in the regular symphonic repertoire.”
Nothing particularly unusual in that.
But the unknown composer was one Florence Price and she was Black.
Florence was born in 1887 in Arkansas to a music teacher mother and a dentist father. Her mother encouraged her talented daughter in her musical studies and Florence eventually went on to study at the new England Conservatory of Music, majoring in piano and organ.
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